


Fifty/Fifty

by exoscopy



Category: Problem Sleuth (Webcomic)
Genre: M/M, Mobsterswitch
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-10-08
Updated: 2011-10-08
Packaged: 2018-02-08 10:35:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1937649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exoscopy/pseuds/exoscopy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First he buys you whiskey, then he takes over your life. Never trust a mobster, thinks Snooping Scout, especially not a mobster who owns your shitty tenement. Double especially for when that mobster is Peccant Scofflaw.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fifty/Fifty

Your name is Snooping Scout, and someone has asked you to sign for a package.

 

This is not a common occurrence. You blink blearily at the courier from the narrow gap in your doorway, squinting at her hopeful smile over the security chain.

“Mr. Scout?” she repeats. You grunt at her. There’s got to be another Scout in this city, figures they got the wrong place. You cast an itching eye over your greasy, damp, peeling apartment and think, then again, pretty hard for them to get it this wrong.

 

You rub the grit from your eyes and glance at the package: it’s small and flat, wrapped in plain brown paper with a bit of white string. Nothing special. Grumbling, you reach under the chain and scrawl something all over her bit of paper, and retreat into your bombsite of a kitchen with your gift. 

 

There is a breadknife on the counter; you pick it up and saw listlessly at the string, staining the wrapping with rust. What is inside suddenly flashes bright silver.

 

You fish it out between two fingers and stare at it. It’s a cigarette case, or at least you _think_ it’s a cigarette case: that sort of stuff is too posh for the likes of you, but you think it’s like the one Detective has, only – brighter. You flip it over. The blood drains from your face.

 

Embossed on its top is a laurel wreath. You know of only one person who uses that emblem; no other would fucking dare. With hands still sleep-shaky you flick open the lid. Inside it someone has propped a tiny card, twilight-sky blue. You pull it out with trembling fingers and turn it over.

 

 _Hey scout_ , you read – no capital letter on your name, which really hammers it home – _thought I’d get your smokes a better home_.

 

You slam the lid shut in a fit of fury. He’s fucking _mocking_ you. You can hear him drawling the words slow and smug as if he was right behind you, breathing into your ear.

 

You throw the cigarette case under your sagging, rumpled bed and ignore it for the rest of the day.

 

 

The next day, you return to find someone has left a crate outside your apartment. This is unusual because it hasn’t been pinched yet. Once you get closer, though, you can see why: there is a plain blue-black card pinned to it, and you swear profusely. You give it a hell of a kick and tear the card off, but there’s nothing written on it, just the stamp of a dark purple laurel.

 

With a scowl, you kick the lid open: it is six bottles of White Hoofbeast, packed in straw. Your lip curls. Bastard. You take them inside and line them up on the ground, beside your bed, and sit staring at them until your head hurts from thinking and you make the most of a bad thing.

 

The next is a set of two: you crouch on your doorstep and pick them open. One is a new tie, some kind of silky patterned bullshit. The fuck does he know? You don’t even _wear_ ties.

 

Then you look at the other box, and you think: oh _fuck_ no.

 

It’s round, made of some polished leather with a buckle on the front and a carved wooden handle on the top. You snarl at it and wrench it open: nestled inside on a nest of crushed tissue is a dazzling new white hat.

 

You drop the box down the dumbwaiter shaft and stalk back to your apartment, seething with the kind of raw fury you only usually feel around Snowman. The crash can be heard all down the corridor. No one mocks your fucking hat; not even Peccant Scofflaw.

 

The gifts keep arriving over the next few days. You ignore them until the postlady puts a flea in your ear and you reluctantly allow one or two of the larger ones indoors, feeling weirded out by the presence of all this expensive bullshit in your dump of an apartment. Some of the gifts make no fucking sense – soft bedsheets? When the fuck did Scofflaw turn into your fucking interior decorator? What the fuck gave him the idea that you cared about any of this?

 

They keep appearing. It eventually gets fucking ridiculous tripping over every inch of your floor (as opposed to every second inch, before the gifts started arriving).

 

That month you scrape through your savings, by which you mean you don’t blow your whole paycheck on cheap booze. Detective raises an eyebrow at you counting scratch on your shared desk. ‘Shared’ means it’s essentially Detective’s; you’ll be buggered sideways if you do any sort of paper-pushing, so it’s queer to see you using it at all. 

“Making plans, Scout?” he says dryly.

“Fuck off, Detective,” you grumble. “How much for a tank of gasoline?”

“Gasoline-” His brow creases. “I see. I assume this isn’t for the van?”

 

“No way,” you sneer, hefting your meager cash. “I’m hosting a fucking bonfire.”

“A bonfire?” Demoman appears over the edge of the table. “Jeez, that sounds like a good time, Scout. Can I come?” he gushes, sounding really thrilled. “D’you like marshmallow squares, Scout? I could make some, me and Brawler make good marshmallow squares-”

“Scout’s just kidding around.” Detective shoots you a flat-eyed look, hard and sharp like the diamond bit on a drill. You grimace.

 

“Yeah,” you say grudgingly. “That’s all.” His face falls.

“Oh,” he says, “so there won’t be a bonfire?”

“No.” Both you and Detective say it at the same time; you shoot him a glare which he brushes off stony-faced, the same way the two of you always play it.

“Oh.” Demoman blinks. “Still a place for marshmallow squares, though, right?”

“Certainly.” Detective nods, deadpan. “There’s always time for marshmallow squares.”

 

This placates Demoman, at least for the moment, and he bounds away excitedly. Detective turns to you.

“So,” he says, unruffled, “will you need a vehicle?”

 

And that’s how the two of you end up in an abandoned parking lot at fuck o’clock, warming your hands on the flaming, gasoline-soaked heap to which you’ve consigned Peccant Scofflaw’s shitty gifts.

 

“Care to tell me about this mess?” Detective’s been quiet until now, apart from the occasional remark about your squalid apartment. You sat in the car with your feet propped on the dashboard and scowled the whole way here, listening to the cans of gasoline clanking under your seat.

“Not really.” You dig in your pockets and pull out a ratty dogend, which you chew on contemplatively before lighting it in the flames. Detective eyes you with a faint disgust and extracts a much nicer-looking cigarette from his cigarette case.

“I see. This?” He reaches into his coat, and the next thing you know he’s pulled out the laurel wreath case, dull orange in the firelight.

“What about it?” you snap. “None of your fucking business, alright?”

 

Detective just looks at you, and if he was anyone else you’d slog him and stalk off right about now. But you owe Detective one better than that, so you jam one hand in a pocket and stare into the fire, watching the pillows crinkle into a mess of burning feathers.

“Shall I guess?” He flips the case open and you realize, disgusted at yourself, that you forgot to take out the card.

“What gives you the fucking right to sniff around my place anyway?” You wrench the card from his fingers and toss it in the fire. Detective cracks a dry smile.

“Firstly, you allowed me into your damn home, and secondly, you blustered until I was scouring the place with a fine-toothed comb for anything that looked mismatched. I assure you, this was easy to find.” He drops it into your hand. “What do I say to you at this juncture?”

“Nothing,” you mutter, turning the case in your hand. “Nothing’s going on.”

 

“If you insist,” is all he says, and you narrow your eyes at him, because Detective has never been the sort to drop a trail until he’s satisfied.

“You going to be breathing down my neck about this?”

“Yes,” he says, drawing on his cigarette. “Don’t be a moron. If you had to pick a mob to tangle with, you could do a lot better.” The sarcasm makes you snarl, but he leans over. “I don’t want the last time I see you to be at a morgue.”  
“So send Brawler or Demo instead.” You spit into the fire. “No need to get your suit dirty.”

“Not the point I’m making.”

“I know how to handle myself around crooks,” you snap.

“Of course.” He throws the cigarette into the fire and his lips are pressed thin. “Except once you’re in it’s the getting out you’re terrible at, isn’t it?” He lets that hang in the air for a few moments. When you take a break from spluttering expletives, Deadeye shoots to kill. “I’m watching your damn back. Don’t get in a lather because I’m trying to keep you from getting burned.” 

           

“For fuck’s sake,” you hiss, “nothing’s happening, alright?”

“Have I told you that you lie as poorly as you dress?” he says tightly. “Scout, the Felt aren’t especially fond of you as is. If you mess around with the Scoundrels-” You have had enough of this, and you storm off with a parting shot of, “You watching out for me or your reputation?”

 

Both of you are too proud to apologise there and then, so you skulk home in a real snit – fuck Deadeye – and purposely sleep through the rest of the day, not turning up at the office. The phone rings and rings and rings but you don’t pick it up; you lob a glass at it after the fifth call and it goes flying off its shabby end-table, crashes into the wall and then finally, gloriously, shuts up.

 

Not even the postlady comes by, leaving you free to spend your night polishing off the remaining White Hoofbeast and throwing knives at a picture of Scofflaw nailed to your door. You spend half your time in a drunken haze, stumbling from room to room in a restless migration from comfortable surface to comfortable surface, and the other time cursing profusely – at Detective, at Scofflaw, at Snowman; at anyone you can think of who has ever pissed you off, and the list is long enough that you manage to entertain yourself quite considerably. 

 

But sadly, you had to run out of booze sometime soon. So you stagger out of the house already half drunk, fumbling your hat on – a man without his own damn hat is a sorry excuse for a man – and trip halfway down the stairs, miraculously not spraining or breaking anything. Even drunk your mind can still calculate the distance to the nearest gin joint, but it stops short when it realizes: the nearest one is the one where you met Peccant Scofflaw. You haven’t been back there since, you don’t ever want to, and you don’t want to be within two miles of a place where the bastard could be.

 

Grumbling, you aim yourself in the opposite direction. Fuck. First your house, now your favourite bars.

 

 

You wake up with your mouth tasting of grit, neck aching dully. The sun blazes straight on your face and colours the inside of your eyelids blood red. Wooden slats press sharply into the small of your back, and you grunt, sitting up. This is a park bench. You rub at your face and detect, with no real surprise, that you feel like shit.

 

Someone clears their throat next to you. You turn, teeth bared, only for your blood to suddenly erupt into boiling lead in your veins. You’d recognize that posture and hat anywhere, even with your eyes feeling like someone’s pickled them and your vision still blur.

“Wha’d’you want?” you snap, thick-tongued and muzzy. Snowman elegantly shrugs one shoulder.

“I thought you were a vagrant, Scout,” she says, and her lips curve up just the tiniest bit. “I was going to wake you up for being a public nuisance, but you looked so peaceful.” She blows a cloud of smoke and you flap your hand irritably to waft it away. You got the habit from her. She likes to remind you about that.

“Cut the fucking social call.” You press the heels of your palms to your eyes, wishing your vision would clear so you could glare at her properly. “If you’re going to arrest me make it quick, I haven’t got all day.”

 

“Now why would you think that?” She glances sidelong at you and you wish you could rip her fucking knowing smile right off. “I haven’t heard of you doing anything that’d warrant it. Unless you’ve been up to your old tricks again. Old dogs, hmm?”

 

You lurch to your feet, snarling curses at her.

“No, really,” she drawls. “Anything you’d like to tell me? If you could save me the effort, I’d appreciate it. My time is precious.”

“Then you’d better not be fucking wasting it lounging on a park bench or something stupid like that.” Your lip curls. “I’m off. I hope I never fucking see you again.”

“Ever the conversationalist,” she murmurs, and takes a drag from her cigarette holder. “Well, Scout, as long as you’re not messing around with the wrong crowd, I can’t hold you, can I? Enjoy your afternoon.” You almost stop short at that. But no, you can’t tip your hand to Captain Snowman, so you slink off.

 

Mostly you feel like someone is going dead-on for your temples with a hammer, but underneath that there’s a chilly current of nerves: first Detective, now Snowman. It’s like the ghosts of fucking bad decisions past, present, and future knocking on your door on Hangover Eve, and here you are, Ebenezer Scout, just waiting for the last ghost to show up only instead of a headstone it’s the river and nobody turns up to your funeral because they _can’t find your fucking body_.

 

You slouch up to your apartment and fuck Snowman, you’re real jittery now. She’s got an eye on you and that means the fuzz’ll be breathing down your neck for the next few weeks, watching to see where Snooping Scout slips up. Not like they needed another reason, not when Captain Crowbar always has one eye on you. You open your door and kick it wide, hands jammed into your pockets.

           

Which is when you discover that someone has cleaned up your apartment. Whoever they were, they have also replaced your curtains, your dining furniture and – you scramble to look – your bedsheets. As well as the _entire fucking bed_. It is now a four-poster black-on-black monster, which sprawls all the way across your bedroom and gives off an aura of unbelievable amounts of dough. You gape at it in disbelief. You have not the faintest idea how they managed to get it through the door.

 

“Love what you’ve done with the place, Scout.” You whirl around. Slouched in your hallway, hat covering his eyes but not his brilliant wild grin, is Peccant Scofflaw.


End file.
